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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2008
The composer Robert Simpson was a pupil of Herbert Howells, studying with him for the D.Mus which he took at Durham University in 1951. This was the time of the St Pauls' Service, when Howells was nearly 60 and Simpson just 30. Simpson took no composition lessons with Howells, but had tuition from him in counterpoint. Simpson told me that one day he had written a fugue on a subject of his own devising, and he took it along to Howells with not a little pride in his achievement. Howells looked at the fugue, said nothing, and then took out a fountain pen and, as Simpson put it
wrote a complete fugue there and then, in his beautifully fastidious hand, as fluently and easily as if he was writing a letter, exploring all the intervals and implications of my subject in a way that I had not thought possible.
* This article was originally a paper given to the Annual General Meeting of the Herbert Howells Society, held in New College Oxford on 14 October 2006. My grateful thanks go to Andrew Millinger, Secretary of the Herbert Howells Society, for commissioning it, and to David Millinger for preparing the musical examples.